I really love how you ignore the mantra itself to point the binary gender lock. Just brilliant!

Aaand I am maybe (or maybe not) a terminator send from the future patriarchy to kill the world feminist leader that will rise from this forum BUT I would be one of the cheap ones, not like these fancy T-1000 assholes, SO no liquid nitrogen for me, thanks!

I am absolutely ignoring the mantra. The mantra can go jump in my liquid nitrogen bath as far as I’m concerned.

Regarding the required reading I left you, the crucial frame there are the anti-patriarchal messages in the 13th frame where ’Nique is standing in the way of: “Break the [gender] binary”. Even if Tat hasn’t explicitly said which binary system needs to be broken, given that most of the other Matrix-like frames have elements which consist of columns of the traditional male symbols (Mars’ shield and spear) or female (Venus’ mirror), it seems to be the most reasonable explanation.

So, it’s cute and all that your P-mantra defines gender based on a simple binary decision of whether you possess a penis or not, the take home message is that gender is a bit more complicated than that.

Sure, most people are comfortable (for varying degrees of ‘comfort’) with their gender role, or have never seriously thought about gender. Given there are a couple of thousand registered users of this forum (however many of them are actually active is another question) you’d expect simply from statistics that a few of them don’t identify either as a man or woman by gender.

So no thanks, I’ll be sitting out as a conscientious objector while you go on about your phallocentric mantra, not interested in playing.

Xanthë, if I do a dada joke whit tangential pop references and you reply me with a well argumented exposition of your views, well... open up your gas gallon, 'cos I'm going to be a sad dudebro and cry u.u

In the other hand, the diagram is quite interesting, which page/lliterature do you recommend me to learn more? Think that I am a newbie on this grounds.

If it was a dadaist joke wouldn't it be essentially incoherent and not use the form of any type of recognized joke? A rejection of the common, logical idea of what a 'joke' actually is?_________________Juke Joint Jezebel

Yeah, sorry about harshing your mellow Arkhron ’cos I was being all serious like, what with the gender consciousness-raising stuff, seeing as I have major personal issues with gender policing by society (basically, it sucks) and ’cos my namesake in the cartoon is in fact emblematic of that resistance to gender norms. (So I was very amused when I discovered that Tat had used the exact name which I use as a pseudonym around the web, and so finally got my ass into gear and registered an account.) Anyway…

[More sex/gender consciousness-raising messages]

As for reading on the non-binary nature of sex and gender, try a quick read of the wikipedia articles on Intersex and Transgender? The intersex article points out that not everyone is born being clearly and unambiguously male or female, and that there are a variety of conditions which can cause someone’s sex to be ambiguous (at birth, or later in life). Transgender at a stretch can include people who flirt with non-typical gender presentation, but normally it means people whose perception of their gender is different from their sex, and so it includes as a subset those who wish to medically change their bodies (hormones or surgery) to remove the mental distress (gender dysphoria) that that discrepancy between sex and gender causes.

That gender diagram came out of a to-and-fro of blog posts in anger between Dr Harriet Hall at Science Based Medicine, and Will Robinson at Skepchick. The sixth installment where I took that graphic from is here, and links to the previous five blog posts are at the start of it. Basically, for most people who are not transgender or genderqueer — the term of art for this is cis-gender, or just cis- for short — then sex and gender identity are more or less the same thing.

Hall started the series off with a discussion of the sexual difference between males and females, which are generally much smaller on average than the range of diversity that is to be found within each sex. The way she stated that however, basically ignored the existence of either transgender or intersex people, because a lot of time she conflated sex with gender. Yes it may be true 99% of the time that a person’s sex matches their gender, but Will’s response was that it’s not cool — especially for someone writing from a position of medical authority on a blog entitled science based medicine! — to write off the remaining 0.x% of people for whom sex and gender aren’t the same thing, when it’s something science has known about for decades.

It’s the same sort of idea as with sexual orientation: just as there’s a spectrum of people who have differing intensity of attraction to people of different genders, so it is with a person’s perception of their own gender; while there is the main binary division of men and women, there are also those who feel like they are both – or neither – or inbetween – or something different again entirely. So while gender roles that society imposes on people often turn out to be stereotypes which are oppressive to both men and women, it’s even more so for people who don’t want to fit either of those classes of stereotypes, or that they don’t fit the one which they’re told that they have to fit.

[End sex/gender consciousness-raising message]

On the topic of the cartoon, ’Nique presents herself quite androgynously these days, and if I recall correctly, she didn’t change hugely when she went into the Trans Zone (flat chested, a suggestion of stubble). The idea of the Trans Zone seems to buy into the binary idea, that a cis man or a cis woman walking into it are transformed into a (cis) woman and man respectively. What about a trans* person whose gender identity isn’t binary? We have a few gay, bi, and lesbian characters in the cartoon, are there any unambiguously trans* characters?

Don't worry about my mellow, it's fine. Aaand some of the fun of the dada thing is the surprise... Getting a logical reaction is a sign about bad dada u.u

I will improve it!

Thanks for the explanation, the tabs are open and gonna read them.

About the Trans Zone... well... we are talking about the Reality one in the next thread! xD

But... well... I think that we would be better (more sane, surely) if we found the moment when Mr. Tatsuya becomes aware of the feminist struggle with the actual society and choses to inmerse in the cause.

I think it would be good. Most of the strips before that point are "mainstream" in their alignment (the Trans Zone i.e.) and... well, after Mr. Tatsuya went through the rabbit hole, a lot of things changed and become deeper._________________Be mellow
Be compassionate

About the Trans Zone... well... we are talking about the Reality one in the next thread! xD

I know, it’s interesting and I’m tempted to join in (but I need to get on with stuff I should be doing). I wouldn’t be upset if we have a discussion on the theory of the Trans Zone, but I might have to wait for another day…

Sure, you have a busy day and I have a ton of material to read. Sincerely, I am shocked with what I'm reading. In the intersex article seems that mostly of them are people with conditions and in the Gender Identity Disorder article...

Well, it says Disorder in the title. Wait, what?

I need to read more, but yes, a Trans Zone talk would be amazing (other day)_________________Be mellow
Be compassionate

Oh, and that’s another thing which makes these discussions interesting: transgenderism is probably decades behind where the acceptance, discussion, and terminology relating to homosexuality has gotten to, and so the terms you use to describe things is in flux. Homosexuality used to be viewed as a disorder up until the early 1970s, which is pretty insulting to gay/bi/lesbian people when you think about it. The current term for gender dysphoria is only changing as of this year, in the new edition of the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) which is due out in May I think. Previous editions, it was called ‘gender identity disorder’, i.e. treated as mental illness, rather than a natural variation that some people are different.

I'm from Denmark, I lived in the Balkans at the start of the war. I haven't made anything up, the fact that you can't fathom that there's a world outside the US is just proof of how pathetically naive you people are.

As a American black man, my response to this is naturally "WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY YOU PEOPLE ?".

Seriously though, I blame our education system that no one is funding.
While America sends cash to fund schools in other nations, other nations are not funding ours. If you want "World history" to be a emphasized priority in schools, you are going to have to fund it out of your own pocket.